To some, former Mayor of Boston Tom Menino seemed the type to micromanage, sometimes ruthlessly, the city’s business community. You may remember back in 2012 when Menino pulled out all the stops to keep Chick-Fil-A from planting commercial roots in the city because the food chain donated money to advocacy groups against same-sex marriage. Prior to that, he blocked Walmart from similarly settling in Boston while other cities embraced the world’s largest retailer.
Turns out, Menino made the right call.
Though the longest serving mayor in the history of Boston stood against Walmart because he felt the conglomerate would be detrimental to local small businesses, refusing Walmart actually paid dividends for current Mayor Marty Walsh and his notable campaign to curtail neighborhood violence while bolstering public safety. Most recently, Mayor Walsh enacted a gun buyback program to try and get illegal firearms out off of Boston’s streets and joined Menino’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns to band together with municipal leaders across the country to attempt to undertake the same endeavor on a national scale.
A recently published study called “Rolling back prices and raising crime rates? The Wal-Mart effect on crime in the United States” shows throughout the 1990s, crime rates in counties where Walmart set up shop actually slowed compared to ones that did not.
“If the corporation built a new store, there were 17 additional property crimes and 2 additional violent crimes for every 10,000 persons in a county,” said Scott Wolfe, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and lead author of a new study.
Wolfe and his constituents examined 3,109 U.S. counties during the 90s, of which Walmart established businesses in 767. It was during this time that crime rates nationwide were in the midst of a drastic drop. Walmart, however, targeted counties that were experiencing higher-than-average crime rates and subsequently had a hand in clotting any potential drop.
“Counties with more social capital – citizens able and willing to speak up about the best interests of the community – tend to have lower crime rates,” said co-author David Pyrooz, assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Sam Houston State University. “Counties with more crime may have less social capital and, therefore, less ability to prevent Wal-Mart from building.”
But how exactly that pertains to a restricted crime rate drop remains muddled. Sure, the study illustrates that Walmart stores were directly correlated with increases in poverty and economic disadvantage, major components that lead to crime, but not crime itself.
“More research is needed to uncover why the Wal-Mart effect extends to crime,” Wolfe said further. “Does it reduce community social cohesion or simply increase opportunities for theft and other crimes in specific store locations that are great enough to influence county crime rates? These are questions that remain.”
What we do know is that this isn’t happening in Boston thanks to Mayor Menino.
[Image via Metro]
